A Scottish site, revered by evolutionary geologists worldwide
as the birthplace of their long-age philosophy, actually gives powerful evidence
for the Genesis Flood.

A rocky peninsula near Cockburnspath, 60 km (40 miles) east of Edinburgh,
Scotland, has become something of a ‘Mecca’ for modern geologists.
According to one geology professor, the first thing you notice about Siccar
Point is that it is covered with geology students.1 This
is understandable because the site features regularly in geological literature
as an icon of ‘deep time’.2

Atop the grassy cliffs, pilgrims enjoy a bird’s-eye view before descending
the steep, treacherous path to the rocky point at shore level. This has been
called the birthplace of modern geology, where James Hutton supposedly ‘obtained
his revelation’ that the earth was not made in six days some six thousand
years ago, but was unimaginably old.

Some have placed Hutton alongside Darwin as one whose ideas shattered the
biblically-rooted picture of the earth, and separated western thinking from
its Christian foundation.3 Indeed, Hutton’s ideas
inspired Darwin4 and gave him
the eons of time he needed for his theory of evolution.

Photo by Bryce CrawfordFigure 2. Hutton’s unconformity. The man
sitting on the lower, vertical rocks points to the contact where the upper,
almost-horizontal beds of Old Red Sandstone rest.

In Hutton’s day, the dominant view in Eastern and Western Europe and
North America was that God created the world in six 24-hour days about 4000 BC,
and about 1,700 years later, the earth was judged with a catastrophic global
Flood. When Hutton first published his theories in 1785, they directly challenged
the authority of the Bible.

Siccar Point played a key role in the drama, and that is why the site is
so revered. Recently, one geology student described how, when his group reached
the point, they were moved to read extracts from the writings of Hutton and
John Playfair.5

Hutton and Playfair6 visited
Siccar Point in the late 1700s, not by the A1 motorway, but by boat on a fine
day that enabled them to keep close to rocks along the shore. ‘What clearer
evidence’, Playfair wrote, ‘could we have had of the different
formation of these rocks, and the long [time] interval which separated their
formation?’7 So what did they really see?

What Hutton saw

At Siccar Point two distinct kinds of sandstone meet (figure 2). The strata
of the lower, older sandstone are tilted almost vertically, and they have been
sliced off abruptly, in a nearly horizontal line. The upper, younger sandstone
has been deposited on top of the eroded surface and is still almost horizontal.
The place where these rocks touch is called an ‘angular unconformity’.8

As James Hutton explored the Scottish hills, he could see that rainfall gradually
eroded the rocks, and that rivers carried the sediment into the sea. From what
he saw, he envisaged that it would take many thousands of lifetimes before
the hills eroded away.9

So, when Hutton viewed the sandstone outcrops at Siccar Point, he wondered
where the sand had come from. He reasoned that the older, lower rocks must
have been much higher in the past. As these eroded down, they produced the
sand which now forms the upper rocks. But where did the sand for the lower
rocks come from? Presumably there must have been even-older rocks which were
eroded away. And for those rocks? There must have been older rocks still, and
so on endlessly. So Hutton saw ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect
of an end’. He concluded that, contrary to what the Bible records, the
earth must be unimaginably old.

Most people think the idea of billions of years comes from radiometric dating.
But clearly that’s not true, since this dating method was not developed
until the beginning of the 20th century, about 100 years after Hutton
died. Hutton based his idea of an old earth on an assumption. It was
not a discovery. He assumed that the same slow processes eroding the Scottish
highlands in the present formed the ancient rocks by the North Sea in the past.
So an old earth is the outworking of an unbiblical philosophy (cf. 2 Peter 3:3–7).

Photo Ian Leitch

Figure 4. Overlying sandstone strata.

However, if Hutton had examined the sandstone outcrops a little more closely,
he would have realized that extraordinary processes, quite different from
what he saw in Scotland, were involved. Hutton misinterpreted the rocks at
Siccar Point because of his faulty assumptions. Almost all geologists who have
visited the site since then have missed the real significance of the outcrop
for geological time, because of thinking the same way.

The lower rocks

The lower rocks are composed of grey vertical beds of alternating greywacke
and shale.10,11 Greywacke
is a type of sandstone which indicates that it was deposited very rapidly.
It is composed of particles with a range of sizes, from very coarse sand to
fine clay. This means that the sediment was transported and deposited so rapidly
that it did not have time to sort into different sizes (as occurs on beaches
and in rivers today).

Figure 5. A ‘graded bed’ has a sharp,
distinct base with the coarsest grains of sand at the bottom. Moving
upwards in the bed, the grains of sand become gradually finer and finer.
The top of the bed is followed abruptly with the base of the next graded
bed. Graded beds may form from fast-flowing underwater avalanches.

Also, the grains of sand in greywacke are not rounded, but jagged, indicating
again that the sand was transported rapidly. If it had been trans­ported
slowly in a river, the sharp edges would have been worn smooth as the moving
sand particles rubbed each other.

In a bed of greywacke, the sand is often coarse at the bottom and fine at
the top, indicating that the whole bed was deposited from one pulse of water
(figure 5). Sometimes beds of greywacke show cross bedding, again indicating
that they were deposited from fast-flowing water (figure 6).

The fact that the beds are so flat over such large distances shows that the
water-flows covered a large area. And the flat strata sit one on top of the
other—without any sign of a break in deposition—indicating the
fast deposition processes operated continuously while the whole rock deposit
was formed.

So the lower rocks show abundant evidence for large-scale, rapid deposition.
Evidence for the long periods of time that Hutton imagined is just not in the
rocks.

Diagram courtesy of Steve Austin, Grand Canyon: monument to catastrophe, ICR.Figure 6. Cross bedding is formed as fast-flowing
water generates sand waves on the bottom. The thickness of the beds indicates
the speed and depth of the water.

Folding and eroding

Not only were the lower rocks deposited quickly, but they were folded while
they were still soft and contained abundant water. The beds do not indicate
evidence of brittle fracture. So they must have been folded while still plastic.
Also, as a result of the folding, the rocks changed (metamorphosed) and new
minerals such as mica grew in them. Metamorphic reactions need abundant water
if they are to proceed.12 All this means that there
was not much time between deposition and folding.

Another evidence of catastrophe that Hutton missed was the contact between
the upper and lower sandstones. He interpreted the contact as a long time-break
between the folding and deposition of the next layer of rock. However, where
the lower vertically bedded rocks are exposed to the weather in the area, pronounced
differential erosion is evident. The softer shale erodes from
between the beds of the harder greywacke, which stand out like ribs across
the countryside.

However, the contact shows no differential weathering (figure 8), which indicates
that the erosion was by catastrophic processes, unlike the gradual erosion
of the countryside today. Also, there is no evidence of a soil layer at the
contact,13 as would be expected if the
rocks had been eroded by normal weathering.

The upper rocks

Geologists have called the upper sandstone beds, which sit on top of the
greywacke, the ‘Old Red Sandstone’ (figure 4). These also show
dramatic evidence of catastrophe.

Photo by David TylerFigure 7. Part of the metre-thick layer of
broken rocks that sit on top of the contact. Rocks are blocky and angular,
and some are as big as a football.

First, the base of the Old Red Sandstone consists of a metre-thick layer
of broken rocks, called a breccia (figure 7). Large clasts (broken pieces)
of greywacke, some the size of a football, have been ripped off the underlying
rocks and dumped on top of the eroded surface. The breccia covers a huge geographical
area and the flat surfaces of the rocks tend to face the same direction. This
is an imbricate structure and indicates strong water currents. The broken pieces
of rock are blocky and angular, indicating they did not roll against each other
very much. Obviously they were not transported far from where they were broken
off, and they were deposited quickly. This breccia layer is clear evidence
that fast- flowing water eroded the contact and dumped the broken material
on top. These obvious evidences for catastrophe contradict the supposed need
for long periods of time.

Furthermore, the Old Red Sandstone covers a huge geographical area, indicating
that the catastrophe was very large.14 In
the Scottish Midland Valley, which incorporates Siccar Point, the sediments
are deposited in a rectangular basin. It is 400 km long from Siccar Point in
the east to Northern Ireland in the west. It is 100 km wide, from the Southern
Uplands to the Grampian Mountains in the north. It consists of pebble beds,
sands and silts mixed with volcanic lavas and is more than 7 km thick. Not
only that, but the beds are so amazingly uniform and parallel that they can
be visually traced for huge distances. It was no small river that deposited
these sediments in its delta. The physical characteristics of the Old Red Sandstone
point to exceptional depositional processes, quite different from the sorts
of processes that we see happening on the earth today.

Photo by David TylerFigure 8. A close-up of the contact between
the vertical and horizontal beds. Note that the bottom beds have not been
differentially weathered but have a clean, straight contact.

Also, the sediments within the Old Red Sandstone contain abundant fossils
of fish and plants (figure 9).15 The
specimens are often well preserved, indicating rapid burial under unusual conditions.
They must have been isolated rapidly from the environment to prevent decomposition
and scavenging. These fossils indicate that the sediments were deposited extremely
rapidly.

Most of the sandstone strata show large-scale cross bedding and plane bedding,
which indicates deep, fast-flowing water. This points to a high-energy depositional
environment, not to long periods of time.

The successive beds of the Old Red Sandstone show they were deposited one
after the other without significant time breaks between them. For example,
there is no evidence of ancient soil layers, or of organic matter incorporated
into a soil or of plant roots.13 Some sandstone
horizons contain animal tracks, so there was not much time involved.16 There
are no canyons or valleys cutting across the beds. Yet there should be if,
for long periods, the weather had been eroding them. In other words, the vast
time came, not from the rocks but, from Hutton’s imagination.

A geological icon

So, Hutton did not find the idea of immense geological time, or ‘deep
time’, in the rocks. Why did he misread them? Why do so many geology
students look at the same outcrop and not realize that the long ages are missing?
The vast age comes from a wrong belief about how the rocks formed—from
an anti-biblical philosophy. It willfully overlooks the geological
effects of the worldwide Flood.

Figure 9. Diorama of ‘Devonian’ marine
life. Fossils of plants and fish are found in the Old Red Sandstone.

The unconformity at Siccar Point is evidence of catastrophe on a grand scale.
It is wholly consistent with the events described in the book of Genesis, that
the entire earth was deluged by a globe-encircling Flood. Perhaps Hutton did
not appreciate the magnitude, or the tectonic nature,17 of
that global event. Early in the Flood, sediments were deposited continuously
by underwater avalanches in a deep marine environment. Soon after, these were
cemented, uplifted and eroded by continental-scale water movements. Then followed
more deposition as the global inundation continued—rapidly depositing
the Old Red Sandstone over Europe.

Scientists call Hutton the father of modern geology and his theory has greatly
affected scientific thought. But his ideas on the age of the earth represent
a rejection of biblical history and a return to the old Greek way of looking
at things. As people have increasingly accepted these ideas, we have seen a
rejection of biblical morality and subsequent social decline in Western culture.
In places like Great Britain and America, where Christianity has previously
held such moral influence on the culture, society is falling apart with endemic
drug abuse, sexual immorality, abortion, divorce, school violence and suicide.

Hutton based his conclusion about the age of the earth on wrong assumptions
and a wrong interpretation of the rocks. If only he had believed the Bible
and looked at the rocks more closely, he would have seen that Siccar Point
is excellent evidence of global catastrophe. When we examine the rocks of Siccar
Point, it would be hard to find a clearer testimony of Noah’s Flood in
the geologic record.

References and notes

Unconformity detail in: Siccar Point Field Excursion
Preview, School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, 2001, www.geos.ed.ac.uk/undergraduate/field/siccarpoint/andcloser.html,
21 November 2003. Return to text.

One example is in the college text Press, F. and Siever,
R., Earth, 4th ed., W.H. Freeman and Co., New York,
p. 33, 1986. Return to text.

Repcheck, J., The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton
and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity, Simon & Schuster,
London, 2003. Return to text.

The inspiration came via the first volume of Charles Lyell’s The
Principles of Geology (1830), which Darwin studied while aboard HMS
Beagle. Lyell based his work on Hutton’s ideas. Return to text.

Without Playfair’s revision of Hutton’s book,
Hutton’s ideas may have been lost due to his unclear writing style.
A professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, the much-younger
Playfair became a good friend of Hutton and accompanied him on field excursions.
Although a former Presbyterian minister, Playfair came to believe Hutton’s
arguments for a great age for the earth and, after Hutton’s death,
devoted much energy to promoting his ideas. Return to text.

With an angular unconformity, the strata below
are not parallel with those above. It represents a break in deposition. Return to text.

This idea of Hutton’s has become known as the doctrine
of uniformitarianism—the present is the key to the past. Hutton said ‘the
past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening
now.’ Holmes, A.A., Principles of Physical Geology (2nd ed.),
Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, p. 43, 1965. Return to text.

Crusts of calcium carbonate are present in some horizons
and some have interpreted these as ancient soil horizons. However, they do
not display the segregation of modern soil horizons and are better interpreted
as a post-depositional mobilization of carbonate by groundwaters. Return to text.

The tracks point to rapid processes because the animals
walked on the sediment while it was still soft. To remain soft, the sediment
was deposited quickly, emerged rapidly and was walked over soon after. Further,
before the tracks eroded away, the next layer of sediment covered them quickly.
See Oard, M.J., In the footsteps of giants,
Creation25(2):10–12,
2003. Return to text.

I can't belive how many people think that Hutton and Playfair used Siccar Point to prove the earth is billions of years old. They didn't prove the earth was billions of years old and that the Genesis Flood didn't happen; they assumed that the Genesis Flood didn't happen with no legitimate justification what-so-ever, and therefore concluded that it would have taken billions of years for all the rocks to be eroded away since there was no flood. I guess one could say their "proof" goes like this:

Premise 1) The Genesis Flood didn't happen.
Premise 2) Since the Genesis Flood did not happen, it would take millions of years for the rocks at Siccar Point to be eroded to their current state.

They didn't prove that the Genesis Flood didn't occur. They started with that as their very first premise, then fed it to everyone else and told them they proved it! Sheesh, talk about "Playfair."

This is a very impressive article. I wish I could repeat some of the notes as fluently as they are presented here. Instead, if I can convince some of the people I debate issues like this and evolution with, to come read the articles in this site; perhaps I will succeed in changing someone’s mind with the help of CMI. Thank you very much Tas. Keep up the great work and to all at CMI, God bless you for your efforts.

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